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our friend linda found tables made from reclaimed bowling lanes at the BKLN flea market
porch board
via vz
this is quite a grand discovery for me. at age 13 i visited some cousins in evanston Ill. on the first opportunity i took the train into chicago and headed straight to the old town district. there in a prospering bi-level head shop, hung high on the wall i spotted a life sized poster of a greyhound bus. its stuck with me ever since. epic (!) looking generically warholian (screened americana) and 100% pop (think rosenquist and oldenburg BIG). since the age of the internet ive searched off and on but not until this moment have i found the "A"uthor. turns out, it was mason williams.
i try not to be seduced by the fetish aspects of nakashima furniture. really, they are just straight up trestle tables. free edges? just short cuts to a completed work station. butterfly keys? you need them for mending slabs of wood which might not make the grade otherwise. but this table in rosewood, well it did me in. me and someone with 210k.
In 1954 the artist Asger Jorn wrote to Max Bill, “Bauhaus is the name of an artistic inspiration.” Bill, a former Bauhaus student and the founding director of the newly opened Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, West Germany, a self-anointed successor to the Bauhaus, replied, “Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration, but the meaning of a movement that represents a well-defined doctrine.” To which Jorn shot back, “If Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration, it is the name of a doctrine without inspiration — that is to say, dead.”1from the spring/summer '08 HDM online
This exchange between the orthodox Bill, who would run his school like a monastery, and Jorn, who as a provocation would create something called the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus before going on to cofound the Situationist International a couple years later, was more than just an epistolary joust. Virtually since its founding in 1919, throughout its fourteen-year existence in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin under three successive directors, and in the three quarters of a century since it closed its doors in advance of the Nazis, the Bauhaus has been the object of veneration, hostility, controversy, and myth. It has been variously portrayed as a seminal experiment in pedagogy, a hotbed of radicalism, the standard-bearer of the ethos of functionalism and industrial technology, an aesthetic style, and most broadly, an “idea” synonymous with the spirit of early 20th-century modernity itself. In a new collection of essays thoughtfully edited by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, it is a cultural manifestation closely linked to the political and economic vicissitudes of its times.
Authorship in design is a sticky question, and always has been. There are a few considerations: collaboration, control, voice, and limits. The questions that follow from these considerations are simple enough. If—like architects or filmmakers, but unlike bookwriters or oil painters—we collaborate on our projects with a huge array of people, including paying clients, regulatory and legal institutions, fellow design staff and subcontractors, printers and fabricators, merchants and mailing houses, are we even able to “author” a work? To aid us in this discussion on collaboration’s impact on authorship, some designers (in particular Michael Rock) have pointed out Andrew Sarris’s auteur model, developed for the analysis of filmmaking.
rago has two modern design auctions a year. last fall we saw a frail but spirited Philip Lloyd Powell in the auction room looking very elfin. sadly he has passed on since then. here are some shots of my brothers small PLP side table that came from a little east village thrift shop called "garage sale" which was located on 1st avenue and second street back in the 80's.
back from the rago auction showroom with (up-skirt) images of george nakashima splayed and tapered table legs.
Toward an Architecture is the most influential book on architecture of the modern era. Perhaps only Vitruvius can match it for influence from any age. So let's make that the most influential book on architecture for about 2,000 years.
Emerging from the era of manifestos, it is a radical, hectoring, brilliant book. It blends the eye-catching absurdity of Dada, the strange juxtapositions of surrealism and the technophilic cutaway drawings of a boys' magazine with text that is incisive, sometimes funny and occasionally wholly convincing.
Written in 1923, when Le Corbusier, a Swiss-born architect living in France, had built only a couple of houses, it has survived as the manifesto of modern architecture. It is a paean to the unselfconscious, functional beauty of engineering - an appeal to architects and patrons to abandon outmoded traditional modes of construction and look to the power and clarity of industrial buildings, aeroplanes and machines. And that is how the book is largely remembered, along with its call for the house to be ''a machine for living in'', perhaps the most quoted phrase in architecture. It is also an ode to architectural ambition - grandeur, proportion, elegance and meaning.
nyc canon
square america
by way of reference library
To the north and south of my plebeian ranch-style home here, my neighbors are transforming their pads into midcentury modern showplaces. At one time all you needed to accomplish this was some orange paint and concrete blocks; nowadays the makeover involves a lot of chopping.
One neighbor ripped out the fig and lemon trees planted there 40 years before by the original owner. To the north, modernistas tore out a jungle of honeysuckle vines and asparagus ferns weaving in and out of an old fence.
All around my neighborhood, new owners are hacking off the blond skirts of the Washingtonia filifera palms and amputating tendrils of black dates. In the latest development, they are even shaving the rough bark of the palms, leaving a shiny blood-like surface.
The skinned palm look is very sleek, very atomic -- it goes back to the early days of modernism in the '40s. But it leaves nowhere for a collared lizard, roadrunner, orange oriole or barn owl to hide. It's not even good for the tree.
As I walk around the neighborhood, it's beginning to look like some modernists are intent on annihilating habitat and banishing nature. More yards -- some had resembled gardens in Pasadena with a loose, shady ambience and alcoves of privacy -- sport a minimalist look, with soldierly rows of tufted grasses, or lone agave spikes in seas of gravel or lawn.
the unisim of wadyslaw strzeminski and katarzyna korbo
abandoned roller coaster
via vz
Plans to save a unique section of Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport have stalled on the runway.
MINUS SPACE is pleased to announce an upcoming solo exhibition by New York artist Mark Dagley. Dagley will present four shaped paintings -- two monochromes and two with checkerboard patterns -- which were originally produced in 1987. Dagley made the works in William S. Burrough's Bunker space on the Bowery in NYC, exhibited them later that year at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Soho, and subsequently put them into storage. Dagley's exhibition at MINUS SPACE will mark the first time the works will be shown publicly in more than twenty years.
Mark Dagley (b. 1957, Washington, DC) has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include McKenzie Fine Art (NYC), Sydney Non Objective (Australia), NyeHaus (NYC), San Antonio Museum of Art (TX), Up & Co (NYC, London), Riflemaker Gallery (London), Jersey City Museum (NJ), Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences (NJ), The Shore Institute of Contemporary Art (NJ), Axel Raben Gallery (NYC), and Galeria Leyendecker (Tenerife, Spain).
He is a member of American Abstract Artists and his work has been reviewed in publications, such as ARTFORUM, The Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, and the New York Sun. His work is included in the collections of The Broad Art Foundation, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Swiss Credit Union, Foundation Prini, Hoffman/LaRoche, Henkel Gmbh., and EMI, among others.
Mark Dagley also co- founded and directs Abaton Garage, a project room in Jersey City, NJ, and Abaton Book Company, specializing in artist editions, book projects, cds and videos.
A color catalog accompanies the exhibition, with texts by Matthew Deleget & Nora Griffin, and a comprehensive interview by Don Voisine.
construction site images currently on ebay
rip ralph rapson
your personal theramin
via zoller
i ran in to this shit trying to drag an ebay photo image to my desktop today
end of an era
RENOWNED French designer Philippe Starck says he is fed up with his job and plans to retire in two years.
"I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact," Mr Starck told German weekly newspaper Die Zeit.
"Everything I designed was unnecessary.
"I will definitely give up in two years' time. I want to do something else, but I don't know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself ... design is a dreadful form of expression."
Starck, who is known for his interior design of hotels and Eurostar trains and mass consumption objects ranging from chairs to tooth brushes and lemon juice squeezers, went on to say that he believed that design on the whole was dead.
"In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant," he said.
Mr Starck said the only objects that he still felt attached to were "a pillow perhaps and a good mattress".
But the thing one needs most, he added, was the "ability to love".
5 years death toll sweater
beijing 2008
submitted by lisa